Thanks for the answer and for the advice on how the COD advisory board
could eventually convince the IUCr to let upload the CIF files already
in free access at the Acta journals Web site.

Thanks to Frank Allen for the link to the CCDC 2004 report.

We would like to make first some comments. All of us, at the COD advisory
board, are users of one or all of the crystallography databases (ICSD,
CSD, CRYSTMET, ICDD, PDB, AMCSD, etc). We are quite happy with their high
quality, this is not questioned at all. The only question we want to point
out is that we would like to find in their annual report a text analogous
to the following, extracted from the PDB 2004 report :
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/annual_report04.pdf

"DATA DISTRIBUTION AND ACCESS
PDB data and RCSB services are available without cost through the Internet.
The main RCSB PDB website at SDSC-UCSD receives an average of more than
220,000 hits per day from all over the world. On average, more than
one file is downloaded every second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"

We do not want to accept the idea that PDB or the AMCSD are able to
obtain funding in order to make this free Web access possible, and that
the ICSD, CSD, CRYSTMET and ICDD would not (though, probably, these databases
are already obtaining large public funding).

A well known crystallography Web site like CCP14 is accessed by crystallographers
from >110 countries and > 5000 different institutions. This is quite larger
than the 65 countries and 1006 institutions mentioned in the CCDC 2004
report.

Untill this free Web access is not obtained, the COD will continue to
grow. We had naively believed that the IUCr would have been the first association
to understand such a clear and implicit request from the crystallography
international community. We were obviously wrong. We think that we shall
now concentrate our efforts in direction of the other sources of CIF files
(like ACS, etc). See for instance the list of top five journal CSD providers
and top 20 journals from Table 4 in Acta Cryst B58 (2002) 380-388. data-origin.jpgAfter all, the IUCr journals represent no more than 8%, and ACS represents
28%.

A poster about the COD has been accepted and will be presented at the
next IUCr Meeting, Florence. This will constitute all our efforts in 2005
in the IUCr direction.